last night....the BE had their two best programs from a national recognition standpoint going head to head with espn....will be interesting to see how it held up....
That said, your average prime-time audience last year (287,000, according to a Fox Sports representative) and your viewership among 18-to-49-year-olds (140,000) were a fraction of what ESPN had, at 2.14 million and 965,000, respectively. Does that underscore your earlier point that you’ve made some progress but have a long way to go?
Absolutely. At the end of the day, those numbers and the viewership levels are largely dependent on the live event that you have. If you deliver a Monday Night Football broadcast and you get 15 million viewers, obviously that's a huge, huge win. And they have some fantastic rights. We have good rights and we hope to build on that. But we always went in with a very realistic view of what we would expect. We feel like we’re exactly where we thought we would be and we know that it’s a long-term growth plan. They’re fantastic at what they do, they have great rights and they have a 30-year head start on us. So, none of us were under the illusion that six months in we would be approaching their viewership levels.
